Substrate focused supercomputer design

To design and build a supercomputer is a human time-scale endeavor. To purchase a personal computer is, in many ways, a technology driven time scale.

Suppose an organization budgets $50 million to build a supercomputer. Environmental and regulatory hurdles must be jumped. A new building must be manufactured to house it. A cooling system must be designed and installed. The computer itself must be installed, configured, and tested. It takes years.

On the other hand parts for a single personal computer can be ordered from manufacturers, expected to arrive on a time scale measured in days, and assembled in an hour. And an upgrade is a matter of ordering and installing a single part. As Moore's Law chugs along PC's are edging closer to the power of supercomputers that cost many times as much simply because of the delay. There isn't enough time for a supercomputer to return value before the power of new components doubles a few times and renders them obsolete.

The solution is a new design process for supercomputers. Instead of designing for the most power and most efficient design given available components first make a standard substrate. I'm not talking cabinets and blades here. I mean an architecture focused on rapid module replacement. Require new components to conform to this longer-term standard such that each part will immediately fit into the new system with no interruption in operations.

Take processing power. You can't anticipate the next generation's socket format but you can demand an inexpensive and easily swapped module that accepts any socket and interfaces with the rest of the node without changing the node. You can't anticipate high bandwidth memory-processor stacking but you can demand a module that has a standard interface and allows usage of processor-matched memory without having to remove other memory modules.

Every component can be changed immediately if upgrading is desired, and that means when a new component is ordered it's not a matter of designing a whole new warehouse of racks, but of pulling just that component and putting in new versions.